Parallel lives were being led by those-Budhoo, Kesang-for whom there was no such doubleness or self-consciousness, while Lola and Noni indulged themselves in the pretense of it being a daily fight to keep up civilization in this place of towering, flickering green. They maintained their camping supplies, their flashlights, mosquito netting, raincoats, hot water bottles, brandy, radio, first-aid kit, Swiss army knife, book on poisonous snakes. These objects were talismans imbued with the task of transforming reality into something otherwise, supplies manufactured by a world that equated them with courage. But, really, they were equivalent to cowardice.

Noni tried to rouse herself. Maybe everyone felt this way at some point when one recognized there was a depth to one's life and emotions beyond one's own significance.

Thirty-nine.

In the end what Sai and Gyan had excelled at was the first touch, so gentle, so infinitely so; they had touched each other as if they might break, and Sai couldn't forget that. had excelled at was the first touch, so gentle, so infinitely so; they had touched each other as if they might break, and Sai couldn't forget that.

She remembered the ferocious look he had given her in Darjeeling, warning her to stay away.

One last time after refusing to acknowledge her, Gyan had come to Cho Oyu. He had sat at the table as if in chains.

A few months ago the ardent pursuit and now he behaved as if she had chased and trapped him, tail between his legs, into a cage!

What kind of man was this? she thought. She could not believe she had loved something so despicable. Her kiss had not turned him into a prince; he had morphed into a b.l.o.o.d.y frog.

"What kind of man are you?" she asked. "Is this any way to behave?"

"I'm confused," he said finally, reluctantly. "I'm only human and sometimes I'm weak. Sorry."

That "Sorry" unleashed a demoness of rage: "At whose expense are you weak and human! You'll never get anywhere in life, my friend," shouted Sai, "if this is what you think makes an excuse. A murderer could say the same and you think he would be let off the hook to hop in the spring?"

The usual thing happened, exactly what always happened in their fighting. He began to feel irritated, for, really, who was she to lecture him? "Gorkhaland for Gorkhas. We are the liberation army." He was a martyr, a man; a man, in fact, of ambition, principle.

"I don't have to listen to this," he said jumping up and storming off abruptly just as she was in powerful flow.

And Sai had cried, for it was the unjust truth.

Marooned during curfew, sick about Gyan, and sick with the desire to be desired, she still hoped for his return. She was bereft of her former skill at solitude.

She waited, read Wuthering Heights Wuthering Heights twice over, each time the potency of the writing imparting a wild animal feeling to her gut-and twice she read the last pages-still Gyan didn't come. twice over, each time the potency of the writing imparting a wild animal feeling to her gut-and twice she read the last pages-still Gyan didn't come.

A stick insect as big as a small branch climbed the steps.

A beetle with an impolitic red behind.

A dead scorpion being dismantled by ants-first its Popeye arm went by, carried by a line of ant coolies, then the sting and, separately, the eye.

But no Gyan.

She went to visit Uncle Potty. "Ahoy there," he shouted to her from his veranda like a ship's deck.

But she smiled, he saw, only out of politeness, and he felt a flash of jealousy as do friends when they lose another to love, especially those who have understood that friendship is enough, steadier, healthier, easier on the heart. Something that always added and never took away.

Seeing her subtracted, Uncle Potty was scared and sang: You're the tops You're Nap-O-lean Brandy, You're the tops You're Ma-HAT-ma Gandy!

But her laugh was only another confectionary concocted for his sake, a pretense that their friendship was what it had been.

He had antic.i.p.ated this and had tried to indicate to her long before how she must look at love; it was tapestry and art; the sorrow of it, the loss of it, should be part of the intelligence, and even a sad romance would be worth more than any simple bovine happiness. Years ago, as a student at Oxford, Uncle Potty had considered himself a lover of love. He looked up the word in the card catalog and brought back armfuls of books; he smoked cheroots, drank port and Madeira, read everything he could from psychology to science to p.o.r.nography to poetry, Egyptian love letters, ninth century Tamilian erotica.... There was the joy of the chase and the joy of the fleeing, and when he set off on practical research trips, he had found pure love in the most sordid of spots, the wrong sides of town where the police didn't venture; medieval, tunneling streets so narrow you had to pa.s.s crabwise past the drug dealers and the wh.o.r.es; where, at night, men he never saw ladled their tongues into his mouth. There had been Louis and Andre, Guillermo, Ra.s.soul, Johan and Yoshi, and "Humberto Santamaria," he had once shouted atop a mountain in the Lake District for an elegant amour. Some loved him while he didn't love them; others he loved madly, deeply, and they, they didn't love him at all. But Sai was up too close to appreciate his perspective.

Uncle Potty scratched his feet so the dead skin flew: "Once you start scratching, my dear, you cannot stop...."

When Sai next went to Mon Ami, they laughed and guessed, glad for a bit of fun in the midst of trouble: "Who is the lucky boy? Tall and fair and handsome?"

"And rich?" Noni said. "Let's hope he's rich?"

Fortunately, though, a single bit of luck fell on Sai and shrouded this fall of her dignity. Her rescuer was the common domestic cold. Heroically, it caught her common domestic grief in the nick of time, muddled the origin of her streaming eyes and sore throat, shuffled the symptoms of virus and disgraceful fall from the tightrope of splendrous love. Shielded thus from simple diagnosis, she enveloped her face in the copious folds of a man's handkerchief. "A cold!" Whonk whonk. One part common cold to nine parts common grief. Lola and Noni prepared toddies of honey, lemon, rum, hot water.

"Sai, you look terrible, terrible."

Her eyes were red and raw, spilling over. Pressure weighed downward like a gestapo boot on her brain.

Back in Cho Oyu, the cook rummaged in the medicine drawer for the Coldrin and the Vicks Vaporub. He found a silk scarf for her throat, and Sai hung in the hot and cold excitement of Vicks, buffeted by arctic winds of eucalyptus, still feeling the perpetual gnawing urgency and intensity of waiting, of hope living on without sustenance. It must feed on itself. It would drive her mad.

Was her affection for Gyan just a habit? How on earth could she think of someone so much?

The more she did, the more she did, the more she did.

Summoning her strength, she spoke directly to her heart. "Oh why must you behave so badly?"

But it wouldn't soften its stance.

There was grace in forgetting and giving up, she reminded it; it was childish not to-everyone had to accept imperfection and loss in life.

The giant squid, the last dodo.

One morning, her cold on the wane, she realized her excuse would no longer hold. As curfew was lifted, in order to salvage her dignity, Sai started out on the undignified mission of searching for Gyan.

Forty.

He wasn't anywhere in the market, not in the music and video shop where Rinzy and Tin Tin Dorji rented out exhausted tapes of Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan movies. not in the music and video shop where Rinzy and Tin Tin Dorji rented out exhausted tapes of Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan movies.

"No, haven't seen him," said Dawa Bhutia sticking his head out from the steam of cabbage cooking in the Chin Li Restaurant kitchen.

"Isn't in yet," said Tashi at the Snow Lion, who had closed down the travel side of the business, what with the lack of tourists, and set up a pool table. The posters still hung on the walls: "Experience the grandeur of the Raj; come to Sikkim, land of over two hundred monasteries." Locked at the back, he still had the treasures he took out to sell to the wealthier traveler: a rare thangkha thangkha of lamas sailing on magical sea beasts to spread the dharma to China; a n.o.bleman's earring; a jade cup smuggled from a Tibetan monastery, so transparent the light shone through making a green and black stormy cloudscape. "Tragic what is happening in Tibet," the tourists would say, but their faces showed only glee in the booty. "Only twenty-five dollars!" of lamas sailing on magical sea beasts to spread the dharma to China; a n.o.bleman's earring; a jade cup smuggled from a Tibetan monastery, so transparent the light shone through making a green and black stormy cloudscape. "Tragic what is happening in Tibet," the tourists would say, but their faces showed only glee in the booty. "Only twenty-five dollars!"

But now he was forced to depend on local currency. Tashi's r.e.t.a.r.ded cousin was running back and forth carrying bottles between Gompu's and the pool table, so the men could continue drinking as they played and talked of the movement. A sud of vomit lay all around.

Sai walked by the deserted cla.s.srooms of Kalimpong college, dead insects boiled in piles against rimy windows, bees noosed by spiders' silk, blackboard still with its symbols and calculations. Here, in this chloroformed atmosphere, Gyan had studied. She walked around to the other side of the mountain that overlooked the Relli River and Bong Busti, where he lived. It was two hours downhill to his house in a poor part of Kalimpong quite foreign to her.

He had told her the story of his brave ancestors in the army, but why didn't he ever speak of his family here and now? In the back of her mind, Sai knew she should stay home, but she couldn't stop herself.

She walked by several churches: Jehovah's Witnesses, Adventists, Latter-day Saints, Baptists, Mormons, Pentecostals. The old English church stood at the town's heart, the Americans at the edge, but then the new ones had more money and more tambourine spirit, and they were catching up fast. Perfect pract.i.tioners, too, of the hide-behind-the-tree-and-pop-out technique to surprise those who might have run away; of the salwar kameez salwar kameez disguise (all the better to gobble you up, my dear...); and if you joined in a little harmless chat of language lessons (all the better to translate the Bible, my dear...), that was it-they were as hard to shake off as an amoeba. disguise (all the better to gobble you up, my dear...); and if you joined in a little harmless chat of language lessons (all the better to translate the Bible, my dear...), that was it-they were as hard to shake off as an amoeba.

But Sai walked by unmolested. The churches were dark; the missionaries always left in dangerous times to enjoy chocolate chip cookies and increase funds at home, until it was peaceful enough to venture forth again, that they might launch attack, renewed and fortified, against a weakened and desperate populace.

She pa.s.sed by fields and small cl.u.s.ters of houses, became confused in a capillary web of paths that crisscrossed the mountains, perpendicular as creepers, dividing and petering into more paths leading to huts perched along eyebrow-width ledges in the thick bamboo. Tin roofs promised teta.n.u.s; outhouses gestured into the ether so that droppings would fall into the valley. Bamboo cleaved in half carried water to patches of corn and pumpkin, and wormlike tubes attached to pumps led from a stream to the shacks. They looked pretty in the sun, these little homes, babies crawling about with bottoms red through pants with the behinds cut out so they could do their susu susu and potty; fuschia and roses-for everyone in Kalimpong loved flowers and even amid botanical profusion added to it. Sai knew that once the day failed, though, you wouldn't be able to ignore the poverty, and it would become obvious that in these homes it was cramped and wet, the smoke thick enough to choke you, the inhabitants eating meagerly in the candlelight too dim to see by, rats and snakes in the rafters fighting over insects and birds' eggs. You knew that rain collected down below and made the earth floor muddy, that all the men drank too much, reality skidding into nightmares, brawls, and beating. and potty; fuschia and roses-for everyone in Kalimpong loved flowers and even amid botanical profusion added to it. Sai knew that once the day failed, though, you wouldn't be able to ignore the poverty, and it would become obvious that in these homes it was cramped and wet, the smoke thick enough to choke you, the inhabitants eating meagerly in the candlelight too dim to see by, rats and snakes in the rafters fighting over insects and birds' eggs. You knew that rain collected down below and made the earth floor muddy, that all the men drank too much, reality skidding into nightmares, brawls, and beating.

A woman holding a baby pa.s.sed by. The woman smelled of earth and smoke and an oversweet intense smell came from the baby, like corn boiling.

"Do you know where Gyan lives?" Sai asked.

She pointed at a house just ahead; there it stood and Sai felt a moment of shock.

It was a small, slime-slicked cube; the walls must have been made with cement corrupted by sand, because it came spilling forth from pock-marks as if from a punctured bag.

Crows' nests of electrical wiring hung from the corners of the structure, split into sections that disappeared into windows barred with thin jail grill. She could smell an open drain that told immediately of a sluggish plumbing system failing anew each day despite being so rudimentary. The drain ran from the house under a rough patchwork of stones and emptied over the property that was marked with barbed wire, and from under this wire came a perturbed harem of sulfurous hens being chased by a randy rooster.

The upper story of the house was unfinished, presumably abandoned for lack of funds, and, while waiting to stockpile enough to resume building, it had fallen into disrepair; no walls and no roof, just a few posts with iron rods sprouting from the top to provide a basic sketch of what was to have followed. An attempt had been made to save the rods from rust with upturned soda bottles, but they were bright orange anyway.

Still, she could tell it was someone's precious home. Marigolds and zinnias edged the veranda; the front door was ajar and she could see past its puckered veneer to a gilt clock and a poster of a bonneted golden-haired child against a moidering wall, just the kind of thing that Lola and Noni made merciless fun of.

There were houses like this everywhere, of course, common to those who had struggled to the far edge of the middle cla.s.s-just to the edge, only just, holding on desperately-but were at every moment being undone, the house slipping back, not into the picturesque poverty that tourists liked to photograph but into something truly dismal-modernity proffered in its meanest form, brand-new one day, in ruin the next.

The house didn't match Gyan's talk, his English, his looks, his clothes, or his schooling. It didn't match his future. Every single thing his family had was going into him and it took ten of them to live like this to produce a boy, combed, educated, their best bet in the big world. Sisters' marriages, younger brother's studies, grandmother's teeth-all on hold, silenced, until he left, strove, sent something back.

Sai felt shame, then, for him. How he must have hoped his silence would be construed as dignity. Of course he had kept her far away. Of course he had never mentioned his father. The dilemmas and stresses that must exist within this house-how could he have let them out? And she felt distaste, then, for herself. How had she been linked to this enterprise, without her knowledge or consent?

She stood staring at the chickens, unsure of what to do.

Chickens, chickens, chickens bought to supplement a tiny income. The birds had never revealed themselves to her so clearly; a grotesque bunch, rape and violence being enacted, hens being hammered and pecked as they screamed and flapped, attempting escape from the rapist rooster.

Several minutes pa.s.sed. Should she leave, should she stay?

The door was pushed open farther, and a girl of about ten came out of the house with a cooking pot to scrub out with mud and gravel at the outside tap.

"Does Gyan live here?" Sai asked despite herself.

Suspicion shadowed the girl's face. It was an old, unsurprised sure-ness of ulterior motives, a funny look in a child.

"He's my mathematics tutor."

Still looking as if someone like Sai could only mean trouble, she set down the pot and went back into the house as the rooster rushed forth to peck the grain stuck at the bottom, climbing right inside, giving the hens a reprieve.

At that moment, Gyan came out, caught her expression of distaste before she had a chance to disguise it, and was outraged. How dare she seek him out to find her indulgence in pity! He had been feeling guilty about his extended silence, was considering returning to see her, but now he knew he was quite right. The rooster climbed out of the pot and began to strut about. He was the only grand thing around, crowned, spurred, crowing like a colonial.

"What do you want?"

She saw his thoughts recast his eyes and mouth, remembered that he had abandoned her, not the other way around, and she was bitterly angry.

Dirty hypocrite.

Pretending one thing, living another. Nothing but lies through and through.

Farther away, she could see an outhouse made of four bamboo poles and threadbare sacking over an alarming drop.

Perhaps he'd hoped he'd wheedle his way into Cho Oyu; maybe his whole family could move in there, if he played his cards right, and use those capacious bathrooms, each as big as his entire home. Cho Oyu might be crumbling, but it had once been majestic; it had its past if not its future, and that might be enough-a gate of black lace, the name worked into imposing stone pillars with mossy cannonb.a.l.l.s on top as in To the Manor Born. To the Manor Born.

The sister was looking at them curiously.

"What do you want?" Gyan's refrigerated voice repeated.

To think that she had come to call him momo, momo, cosy scoop of minced mutton in charming dimpled wrapping, that she had come to climb into his lap, ask why he hadn't forgiven her as before at the Christmastime fight, but she wouldn't satisfy him by admitting any vulnerability now. cosy scoop of minced mutton in charming dimpled wrapping, that she had come to climb into his lap, ask why he hadn't forgiven her as before at the Christmastime fight, but she wouldn't satisfy him by admitting any vulnerability now.

Instead she said she had come about Father Booty.

Her outrage at the injustice done to her friend returned to her in a rush. Dear Father Booty, who had been forced onto a jeep leaving for the Siliguri airport, having lost everything but his memories: the time he had given a lecture on how dairies might create a mini Swiss-style economy in Kalimpong and had been greeted with a standing ovation; his poem on a cow in the Ill.u.s.trated Weekly; Ill.u.s.trated Weekly; and "Nothing so sweet, dear friends"-evenings on Uncle Potty's veranda, when the music ended on a drawn-out note of honey, and the moon-it was whole-sailed upward, an alchemist's marvel of illuminated cheese. How fast the earth spun! It was all over. and "Nothing so sweet, dear friends"-evenings on Uncle Potty's veranda, when the music ended on a drawn-out note of honey, and the moon-it was whole-sailed upward, an alchemist's marvel of illuminated cheese. How fast the earth spun! It was all over.

How was he to live where, he despaired, he would be snipped into an elderly person supported by the state and packaged in a very clean box alongside other aged people with supposedly everything in common with him- He had left his friend Uncle Potty in mourning, drinking, the world breaking in waves about him; chair going one way, the table and stove the other; the whole kitchen rocking back and forth.

"Look at what you people are doing," she accused Gyan.

"What am I doing? What have I to do with Father Booty?"

"Everything."

"Well, if that's what it will take, so be it. Should Nepalis sit miserably for another two hundred years so the police don't have an excuse to throw out Father Booty?" He came out of the gate, marched her away from his house.

"Yes," said Sai. "You, for one, are better gone than Father Booty. Think you're wonderful... well, you know what? You You're not! He's done much more than you ever will for people on this hillside." He's done much more than you ever will for people on this hillside."